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Scoundrel Time

HELLMAN AND HAMMETT The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. By Joan Mellen. Illustrated. 572 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $32. HERE they come again: Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, the Nick and Nora of the limousine left, the ultimate fun couple of a decade when martinis before breakfast were de rigueur and mass murder was politically correct so long as the K.G.B. was picking the victims. Even under the best of circumstances, the prospect of wading once more into the moral muck of the Hammett-Hellman menage turns the stomach, and the title of Joan Mellen's dual biography, the first book to be based on Hellman's private papers, isn't exactly encouraging: surely it's a bit late in the day to be paying homage to a "legendary passion," which in point of fact appears to have been worthy of Krafft-Ebing at his most picturesque.

Fortunately, this book's title is largely -- if not entirely -- misleading. Ms. Mellen, a professor of English at Temple University, does seem at times to be half in love with Hammett and Hellman, especially the latter. "Often in the perilous crossings between men and women," she writes in her preface, "I found myself wondering: what would Lily do? And it always comes back to me. She would act; she would throw her hat into the ring, take a stand, present herself, draw on her strengths: wit, great intelligence, perseverance, and the inspiration and courage she had learned from Hammett, who had taught her to trust no authority, to do her damnedest to outsmart a cynical and corrupt society." But the sticky heroine-worship of this passage is not borne out by the bulk of "Hellman and Hammett," whose cumulative effect is devastating.

One wonders if Ms. Mellen's shifting tone is to some extent a reflection of her own disillusionment. Time was, after all, when a great many people saw Hellman and Hammett as heroic figures. Feminists in particular, as Ms. Mellen points out, have been much enamored of their affair, at least the version of it enshrined in Hellman's four volumes of famously unreliable reminiscence. "Feminists thought: here was a woman who had not married the great love of her life, had not bought into the motherhood myth, who was too shrewd not to know a woman can't have it all, and who had produced meaningful work." But Ms. Mellen, having sifted through Hellman's diaries and correspondence, has come to a very different conclusion. In the memoirs, she argues, Hellman spun out of whole cloth "what she had been denied: a lifelong emotional attachment with a man, not the actual one she had with Hammett, but one more romantic."

According to Ms. Mellen, Hellman was a hopelessly premodern woman whose whole life was shaped by the belief that she was unattractive. Once she realized that the alcoholic, wildly promiscuous Hammett (who comes across here as the next worst thing to a sociopath) would never commit himself fully to her, she decided that "if she could not have Hammett, she would become him. She would behave exactly as he did, even as she would teach herself to write in his style. Only thus could she avoid the danger of becoming merely the wallflower, the homely woman ever grateful, waiting for him to beckon her to his temporarily unoccupied bed."

This overly deterministic thesis has the unconvincing effect of explaining away the sort of bad behavior whose true explanation is to be found in bad character. Even so, it does not tempt Ms. Mellen to whitewash the thuggish conduct of her subjects, whether in affairs of the heart or in politics. Many younger readers are doubtless unaware that the authors of "The Children's Hour" and "The Maltese Falcon" were unregenerate Stalinists, and they may well find it instructive to learn that Hellman and Hammett publicly endorsed the verdicts in the Moscow purge trials, signed a petition (written by Hammett and dated nine days before the Hitler-Stalin pact) stating that only "fascists" and "reactionaries" could have been responsible for the "fantastic falsehood that the U.S.S.R. and the totalitarian states are basically alike," and at no time in their later lives recanted their oft-stated belief that the Soviet Union under Stalin was, in Hellman's words, "the ideal democratic state."

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Here again, Ms. Mellen's efforts to show how two presumably intelligent people could have gobbled such hogwash are too pat: she contends that Hammett, having given up writing after the publication in 1934 of "The Thin Man," took up Stalinism as a way of lending meaning to "a life devoid of purpose," and that Hellman went along mainly as "a means of sharing life with him, ingratiating herself as she could not as a wife." But to her credit, Ms. Mellen does not pretend that the American Communist Party was anything other than "a crude transmission belt for Stalin's dictates, a carbon copy of his authoritarian rule," or that the willingness of Hammett and Hellman to do its bidding, whatever their inner motivations, was anything other than contemptible.

As a case study in psychopathology, "Hellman and Hammett" is engrossing, if repetitious; as a portrait of applied Stalinism, it is frank and forthright. What it fails to do is make a persuasive case that Lillian Hellman still matters. Hammett's place in American literature is secure, though minor: he and Raymond Chandler will always be remembered as the Washington and Lincoln of detective fiction. Not so Hellman. Her once-popular memoirs can no longer be taken seriously (least of all as records of fact), while her plays hardly rise above the level of political cartoons -- one can almost see the captions printed in big block letters across the chests of the characters. What life they have, ironically enough, derives from their shrewd use of the forms of bourgeois melodrama. (It was not for nothing that George S. Kaufman, a man who knew a thing or two about commercial theater, responded to "The Little Foxes" by sending Hellman a three-word telegram: "That's telling them.")

In the end, Hellman was no more loyal to her art than she was to anything or anyone else, except for Stalin, whom she revered to the bitter end. Much the same thing could just as easily be said of Dashiell Hammett, of course; once he stopped writing, he became a spiritual corpse responsive only to the call of Johnnie Walker Red, prostitutes and Communism. Perhaps that is the best explanation of why these two coldhearted creatures cleaved to each other through thick and (mostly) thin: they had their love of power politics to keep them warm.

Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary.He is writing "H. L. Mencken: A Life."